Mole rat groups chirp in their own accent

摘要

COLONIES of naked mole rats develop dialects that may help them tell friends from foes. These rodents (Heterocephalus glaber) are extremely vocal. To see whether their vocalisations help maintain their social structure, Alison Barker at the Max Delbriick Center for Molecular Medicine in Germany and her team recorded more than 36,000 greeting calls from 166 naked mole rats in seven colonies raised in labs. After identifying the acoustic features of these soft chirps, such as pitch, peak frequency and duration, the researchers used the calls to train a machine-learning algorithm. Not only could the algorithm reliably recognise individuals within a colony, but the chirps' features were also highly predictive of which colony an animal belonged to, akin to human accents or dialects. This suggests that individuals from each colony have unique voices while all sharing the same dialect. In another test, naked mole rats responded far more frequently to recordings of their own dialect than to other dialects, suggesting they use call and response when identifying colony members. Barker and her team also found that three abandoned pups placed with new colonies developed the dialect of their adoptive homes (Science, doi.org/fsjh).